Frank Field: some home truths on Labour’s ‘equalities agenda’?

On Thursday 2^nd May, The Spectator published a fascinating interview conducted by Isabel Hardman with Frank Field in which Field ranged freely and controversially across subjects including welfare, immigration and the EU, the ‘Living Wage’, his role advising the current Government – and unions (“We won’t win the election because of the unions, we’ll win it in spite of them”).

Field talked of personalities, including Gordon Brown (who “never really understood anything, let alone the economy”), Ed Miliband (“should just take a few more risks”) and Jon Cruddas (who “has got the job of saving us”).

He also made some barbed comments about Labour’s loss of working class women voters, linking it explicitly to the “equalities agenda” pursued by the party under the aegis of deputy leader Harriet Harman – something which I have been critical about here and elsewhere.

Field said:

“Why has our vote collapsed amongst working class women? Because they do not relate to the equalities agenda the Labour party pushes.

“We could just start by saying what I’ve said and apologise for what we’ve done for that group up to now. I mean, our vote has almost collapsed amongst this group. It used to be one of our biggest groups. What the hell do these focus groups tell us or are they so snapshot that they don’t look over time about where we have steered the party?”

As I said in On Patriarchy (Part 2), I question whether Labour is capable of tackling these issues in its internal research, precisely because of the intellectual and material investments that have been made in the equalities agenda. Any results suggesting negative consequences as Field suggests would put the reputations and careers of powerful people on the line and throw what is a highly convoluted system of quotas, preferences and favouritisms into crisis. It would challenge the current essence of the Labour Party as an institution.

Looking at some polling data from IPSOS MORI, Field certainly seems to have a point on the numbers at least. In the 2010 General Election, just 25% of skilled working class (C2) women voted Labour – a lesser proportion than from C1 and  AB (lower, middle and upper middle classes), and down 15% compared to 2005 (13% lower than 1992). In contrast, 33% of men of the same C2 class voted Labour, a 6% decline since 2005 and 9% down on 1992.

There does seem to be a particular problem between Labour and working class women, though it would seem to be part of a more general problem with working class voters in general.

To approach the question why without detailed survey data, we have to rely on conjecture and piecing different bits of circumstantial evidence together. However, as long as we accept that Labour’s approach to female equality is typical of the dominant feminist approach – which I think is incontrovertible – Field’s point seems to hold firm.

This can be seen in the big disjuncture that exists in this country between dominant feminism and women as a whole. As I have pointed out before here, only 14% of 1,300 women who took part in a study by Netmums called themselves feminist, with lesser enthusiasm amongst young women (just 9% of those aged 25 to 29 identified with it and only 8% of those aged 20 to 24).

Meanwhile last year the feminist website The F Word published an article by Pavan Amara in which she said, “out of 38 women who identified as working-class and were interviewed for this article, all [my emphasis] agreed with the statement that working-class women's voices were not adequately heard within mainstream feminism. Some still considered themselves feminists, others refused to identify as feminists because of a perceived glass ceiling of class and education within the movement itself.”

One of those interviewed said: 

“I remember once me and a friend from the same area rocked up [to a feminist event] in mini-skirts, high heels and red lipstick. We went because we felt strongly about women's place in society, but as soon as we walked in they stood there gawping at us like 'Why are you here?'

"We were instantly made to feel unwelcome, but we dressed like that because that's what all the other girls in our area were wearing at the time. They spoke to us like we wouldn't understand the political issues they were talking about, and we didn't really know the vocabulary they were using anyway.

"We tried another one in Liverpool, but felt totally fish out of water there as well. Even when we were deciding where to meet, me and my friend said down the pub over a few pints, and they looked at us with horror.”

That comment about being made to feel unwelcome is something which I think is particularly pertinent, since making people unwelcome is something that I think the Left specialises in. While proclaiming diversity, we often display a strict ideological rectitude that works to exclude all but a narrow band of fellow travellers who generally come from similar social backgrounds.

The convoluted over-theorised structures of ‘privilege’ talked of by feminists are a classic example of this.

It does not have to be this way though. Recently, I had something of a ‘Hallelujah’ moment reading an article written in 1992 by the feminist writers Caroline Knowles and Shamila Mercer – since it reveals how some feminists were making some of the same arguments as I have recently, but 20 years ago.

In their essay, ‘Feminism and Antiracism: An Exploration of the Political Possibilities’, Knowles and Mercer offer some welcome clarity which contrasts nicely with the customary ideological contortions of ‘patriarchy’ and what is now called 'intersectionality’ (in yet another of those gurningly-awful academic assaults on the English language).

Intersectionality is meant to integrate the various different forms of ‘oppression’ based on race, gender, sexuality, class and whatever other categories you can think of as ‘interlocking matrices of oppression’ that are fundamentally inter-related as part of an unjust social system.

Knowles and Mercer have little time for such inventions.

They say: 

“We ... argue that there is no general relationship between race and gender ... there are no inevitable or permanent relationships between groups of people organized in political discourse (constituencies) and political interests and positions. Women are not inevitably oppressed by men or capitalism. Oppression is not inevitable. It is a set of detailed practices which can be challenged by feminist politics.”

Knowles and Mercer take on the dominant feminist politics of their day for not accounting for racial differences but they also (perhaps bravely) take on the dominant antiracist politics of their day for viewing racism as an indivisible phenomenon which “collapses colonial domination, slavery and contemporary racism”.

Their main point is that to oppose racism or sexism, talking about vague structures like patriarchy and colonialism achieves little:

[Apologies for the length of the following quotation but I think publishing it in full is relevant and worthwhile]

“Capitalism, colonialism and patriarchal social systems are frequently identified as producing inherent race and gender inequalities which, in various ways, serve the needs of the systems they perpetuate. The grim inevitability of sexism and racism is the message of these accounts which deal with ‘state racism’ and ‘institutional sexism’. Opposition to these general ‘isms’ is necessarily all-embracing, reaching beyond the manifestations of the problem to the structures of the system itself. Thus, ultimately, all forms of struggle are focused on capitalism and its political organization, the ‘state’. But when, as we are suggesting, racism and sexism are viewed as a series of effects which do not have a single cause, a different kind of politics is established. There is no need to accept these inequalities as inevitable or to develop strategies which strike at the very root of capitalist and patriarchal relations. We need only to identify the practices and procedures throughout a range of social institutions (some of which may belong to what is referred to as the ‘state’ and others of which may not) which have the effect of producing racial and gender disadvantage. These can then be monitored and challenged by feminists and antiracists. The advantage of our approach over the ones we criticize is that it allows small-scale direct political challenges to the concrete practices which produce race and gender inequalities. We argue strongly for a deconstructionist approach to any notion of oppression which is used to account for the position of women and black people. We do not wish to participate simply in the elaboration of accounts of our own oppression. Neither do we wish to celebrate that oppression with meetings and rallies. We prefer a mode of politics which engages with the details of the oppression and which is capable of ending it.”

Like I say, reading this was for me something of a ‘Hallelujah’ moment, albeit marred somewhat by the rather depressing thought of how the debate has not moved on in 20 years, since their critique is as relevant to feminist politics now as it was in 1992.

Labour’s equalities agenda is stuck in this place, buried in convoluted theoretical and organisational structures that practice exclusion and alienation while proclaiming inclusion and empowerment. Frank Field is right, but whether Labour will even be prepared to confront these issues openly and honestly looks a distant prospect at present. 

I hope I am wrong though, as indeed I do with many things.

Is Labour capable of being a One Nation party?

Unite union baron Len McCluskey’s latest declaration of war on ‘Blairites’ in the Labour Party doesn’t exactly promote a vision of Labour as a ‘One Nation’ institution committed to healing divisions in society.

That is precisely the point.

The politics of the major unions affiliated to Labour remain consciously and resolutely antagonistic and divisive, committed to the Marxist-Leninist model of institutional capture (albeit with compromise).  

As McCluskey himself refers to it in the New Statesman interview though, the practice of centralised capture and control is not restricted to the big unions: Tony Blair and New Labour practised it ruthlessly to exercise control over the party.

Peter Watt, the Blairite former general secretary, explained it openly recently: “There was an understanding that controlling process meant controlling the party.  Conferences, policy making and of course selections were all ruthlessly managed.”

Watt has changed his mind on fixing. But as McCluskey has it, the unions are just getting their own back with their latest successes in fixing candidate selections for European elections to include their own people and exclude others.

“Because we're having some success, suddenly these people are crying foul. Well I’m delighted to read it. I’m delighted when Tony Blair and everyone else intervenes because it demonstrates that we are having an impact and an influence and we’ll continue to do so.”

For those of us who like the One Nation idea that Ed Miliband articulated at Labour Party conference last year, these divisions and the practices they promote offer a depressing viewpoint. The unions and the New Labour tendency remain locked in internecine warfare: this is the reality of Labour’s internal power politics, and this is where the real battles are taking place. It is not so much One Nation Labour as Same Old Labour Divisions.

As Atul Hatwal at Labour Uncut put it, “on one point there is now a rare unity between the centrists and the left: the one nation rhetoric is meaningless”.

Though I disagree on the idea itself, Hatwal has a point in addressing the reality, for One Nation remains very much a sideshow within Labour. The big unions who dominate party funding quite rightly see it as a threat to their antagonistic, materialistic brand of politics; the New Labour wing meanwhile remains transfixed (understandably) on the need to assert economic competence and resist Labour’s natural instincts to spend money.

In the midst of this, Shadow Ministers and other major party figures articulating One Nation visions and ideas are almost entirely absent (pumping out press releases strewn randomly with ‘One Nation’ yet promoting the same old policies and positions does not count). The Party is not going along with One Nation and for the most part does not get it.

(Lord) Maurice Glasman, Jon Cruddas and now Arnie Graf have been fighting gamely but can’t do it all on their own. Glasman and Graf in particular are not really politicians. If and when One Nation goes the way of the Big Society, the idea and its promoters will be blamed for little fault of their own.

In reality, they have simply come up against what so many other left-wing reformers have come up against before: the sclerotic nature of the Labour Party, dominated as it by the sort of transactional interest group politics that they argue against.

You may ask, ‘Where is Ed Miliband himself in all of this?’

The response of Miliband’s spokesperson to McCluskey’s latest clunking intervention was admirably strong:

“Len McCluskey does not speak for the Labour Party. This attempt to divide the Labour Party is reprehensible.”

“It is the kind of politics that lost Labour many elections in the 1980s. It won’t work, it is wrong, it is disloyal to the party he claims to represent.”

This does not change much though. Miliband remains stuck in the middle of it all, attempting to reconcile the warring parties.

In such a context, any hopes of the Labour Party itself starting to look like a One Nation institution look distant. Without embodying it through practices and communications, the idea will become less and less relevant and will prove puzzling at best to voters – especially with the likes of McCluskey sounding off every so often.

The chance to change the party in a major way through a major intervention by the leader (like Tony Blair on Clause IV in 1994-5) is probably gone now. So we are left with the old ways, whereby factions compete to secure as much of the Party as they can in order to promote their own people and sectional interests.

The stitch-up and the fix live on; and with them, One Nation Labour will likely die.

Thatcher, Miliband and the dangers of ideology

As I wrote in my first posting explaining why I set up this blog,

“I am against ideologies like neoliberalism and ‘Vulgar’ Marxism, and also some of the forms that have emerged around the politics of identity, including strictly deterministic versions of feminism. Ideologies like these offer simplistic, all-encompassing explanations about the way the world is while setting different groups in society against each other.”

Among other things, Margaret Thatcher’s death has given us cause to reflect on the first of those; neoliberalism: as the crucial economic component of Thatcherism.

In his generally excellent response* to Margaret Thatcher’s death in Parliament on Wednesday 10^th April, Ed Miliband said something on ideology which made me bridle a bit:

 “What was unusual, was that she [Thatcher] sought to be rooted in people’s daily lives, but she also believed that ideology mattered.

“Not for her the contempt sometimes heaped on ideas and new thinking in political life.

“And while she never would have claimed to be, or wanted to be seen as, an intellectual, she believed, and she showed, that ideas matter in politics.”

Ideas certainly do matter, and new ideas are important – indeed crucial if politics is to be of much interest beyond the politics industry. But ideology is something different and something inherently dangerous in my view.

My Oxford Dictionary of Politics says, “Any comprehensive and mutually consistent set of ideas by which a social groups makes sense of the world may be referred to as an ideology. Catholicism, Islam, Liberalism, and Marxism are examples.”

I want to go a bit further than this in saying that an ideology is a system of belief, claiming general understanding of society. An ideology offers a means to explain pretty much everything from within its system. It therefore mirrors the society it claims to understand, as system and structure.

So: Marxism claims to understand society scientifically as a clash of social classes that will inevitably lead from capitalism to socialism; neoliberalism holds up self-interest as the only worthwhile value; and ideologies of feminism see male domination as the overriding factor (a system of ‘patriarchy’, as I have written about here recently).

Each of these ideologies offers an all-encompassing explanation for how things are. They also lead to simplistic interpretations of specific problems, while suggesting simplistic solutions: a ‘one size fits all’ approach. So: class war is all that matters OR freeing up market forces is all that matters OR destroying the patriarchy is all that matters. This is what happens with ideologies.

Funnily enough, Margaret Thatcher’s defining statement that “there is no such thing as society” is something I have some sympathy for. As you can see from this transcript of when she said it, the quotation is taken out of context.

We assume she meant that only self-interest matters (which would have fitted her economic thinking), but she was actually making the point that society is not and cannot be a unit or a thing. Society cannot be seen, heard, touched or measured. It is an intangible idea of something, unless we conceive of it as an adding together of all the real things that make it up.

In this way of thinking, which I find persuasive, society itself is not an actor. It is not a force; indeed it is not an ‘it’ in the strictest sense.

This is called ‘methodological individualism’. It is the belief (which I think is right) that we should be talking about how people, institutions and real, tangible forces influence each other, rather than making huge ideological edifices out of speculation about things we cannot confidently define, like ‘society’.

This is the point at which ideologies become dangerous. As we can see with crude Marxism, neoliberalism and dominant feminism, they offer great interpretative power. They therefore also have great political power via the confidence given to followers.

However, this is often at the expense of truth.

Class struggle, individual self-interest and male domination all have their relevance; indeed all are important. But they are not of overriding importance at all times and everywhere. The world is more complicated than that.

*I think Ed Miliband’s speech to the House of Commons on Mrs Thatcher was his best demonstration yet of what One Nation Labour means in practice. He made it clear how much he disagrees with what Thatcher did, but was respectful and generous in his words and also, crucially, in his tone. For One Nation Labour to mean much more than another slogan, it is in the way that Labour goes about its business. Ed is showing that way. However, as a member, I am sceptical that Labour as an institution is capable of following. Self- and group-interests are just too strong, and the internal workings of the party are dominated by them. At the moment there is little sign of that changing.